RPGs |
Really Good Dwarf Feat
Just a quick post to link to this dwarf feat. It’s good to see player-made content like this. The feat’s for D&D fourth edition, but I imagine it can work in third edition too.
Happy GM’s Day 2010!
March 4th is worldwide GM’s day, when we celebrate the tireless efforts of our Dungeon Masters and game referees. To encourage players to buy gifts for their Dungeon Masters, several retailers are offering discounts of interest to both players and DMs.
PDF retailer RPG Now is offering 25% off a range of products until Sunday 8th March (one “fourth” off, get it?)
Monte Cook’s third edition publisher Malhavoc Press is also offering 25% off all PDF products for the same duration. Book of Experimental Might and Book of Experimental Might II are on offer for $6.75 each, the colossal 808-page Ptolus campaign setting for $45, and 4E designer Mike Mearls’ Book of Iron Might for $5.25.
Finally, Monte Cook’s third edition Dungeon a Day is offering a year’s membership for $84 for the rest of March. They’re also offering free months for introducing friends.
New and Exciting #11: Pathfinder Modern/Future Patronage Launch and Zombie Sky Press
The 5 Most Bad-Ass DD Villains
Vecna is a chump. Sure, he founded an empire, became a lich before it went mainstream clawed his own way up to deityhood, but he’s still not as awesome and gnarly as these characters from Dungeons & Dragons canon.
5. Kyuss (3E, Age of Worms)Like many Dungeons & Dragons villains, Kyuss had a massive cult of fanatically loyal followers and more high-level magic than the Epic Level Handbook. Unlike most villains, Kyuss discovered a way to ascend to godhood, at the cost of permanent imprisonment in an ancient monolith. Not to be deterred, Kyuss took the deal, but not before setting in motion an elaborate two thousand year long plan to have his cultists break him out of prison.
What’s especially awesome is that it works. Elements of the plan include slaughtering most of his followers, inventing and creating the first dracolich, establishing a cult to last for two thousand years, establishing a fake second cult just to distract adventurers, and bringing about the End Times just so that he can escape.
4. Acererak (AD&D, Tomb of Horrors)Powerful undead liches are ten for a gold piece in D&D, but Acererak is something special. He created the Tomb of Horrors, a dungeon so horrible and twisted that it’s not a question of whether your character will be killed or not, but how many blank character sheets you’ll run through per hour.
There’s a Gem of Wishing, which grants the opposite of what you wanted and then explodes to deal 200 damage. There’s a portal which is actually a Sphere of Annihilation. Then there’s a tapestry which falls on you, turns into green slime, and kills you outright. There are also at least two fake Acereraks in the dungeon, one of which can kill you once per round as a standard action.
3. Rary the Traitor (AD&D, Greyhawk)Rary of Ket was one of the Circle of Eight, an elite group of powerful mages whose members include such big names as Tenser and Mordenkainen. The Circle had organized the signing of a peace treaty to end the long-running Greyhawk Wars. This really bothered Rary for some reason, who hatched a plan to kill all the signing ambassadors using a magical trap.
The rest of the Circle got wind of this plan and managed to stop it, but not before Rary killed Otiluke and Tenser and severely wounded Bigby before fleeing to found an empire in the desert. At the same time, his ally Lord Robilar destroyed the Circle’s clones of Tenser and Otiluke to prevent Mordenkainen from reviving them. Tenser had prepared for this eventuality, however, and had left a clone on the moon.
2. Osterneth, the Bronze Lich (4E, Open Grave)Osterneth wasn’t always a the most powerful servant of Vecna, god of secrets. She used to be just some woman who knew a few spells. It wasn’t until later that she tore out her living heart and replaced it with the preserved Heart of Vecna, becoming an undead lich and earning a gold star in the Maimed One’s good books.
If you don’t realize how incredibly risky this is, you probably need to read the story of the Head of Vecna, or rather, the fake Head of Vecna. In D&D lore, the lich Vecna lost a hand and an eye before ascending to deityhood, and these relics became powerful magic items, which the user must cut off his own body part to attach. The AD&D adventure “Die Vecna Die!” introduced several other parts of Vecna, including, a fake head:
“Being a fake, an attempt to place the ‘head of Vecna’ on a freshly beheaded corpse fails; the mummified head just rolls off and drops to the ground. If possible, the DM should avoid outright laughter as long as possible, just in case the would-be tomb raiders want to try their head on a potential recipient or two.”
1. Aurgloroasa, the Sibilant Shade (AD&D, Forgotten Realms)The Forgotten Realms has its fair share of named dragons, but few are quite so murderous as the dracolich Aurgloroasa, a shadow dragon famed for manipulating events from the shadows. After coercing the dwarven city of Thunderhome into building a temple for twenty years and then dedicating it to her own deity, Aurgloroasa raided the settlement and killed everyone.
The population of Thunderhome isn’t recorded, but since the population of Baldur’s Gate is around 100,000 at one point, it’s fair to say this was some massacre. Thirty dwarves escaped, but Aurgloroasa later hunted them down and killed them too. She did all of this in revenge for an event sixty-five years previous, when dwarven miners from Thunderhome tunnelled into her cavern by mistake and interrupted her sleep. I like to think she ate them all.
If that’s not enough, the Sibilant Shade runs a protection racket on shipping worldwide, personally destroying ships who don’t pay their dues. If this dracolich doesn’t have the biggest treasure hoard in Faerun, I don’t know who does.
It's a Boy!
Robot Chicken DD: It Hides Well
After stealing an intelligent flamethrowing ballista, our heroes engage in the age-old debate: left or right? Here’s Robot Chicken D&D part 10, 11 and 12.
Under the cut are parts 11 and 12, and DM’s commentary for parts 5 and 6. If you missed the previous episodes, get caught up on part 1-3, part 4-6, and part 7-9 plus DM’s commentary for parts 1-4.
A useful DM’s tip from part 12: Make sure your players appreciate when their little +2 bonuses make the difference between a hit and a miss. It’s easy as a player to forget which of your bonuses made the difference, and that might make bonus-granting abilities seem less important. It’s also important to track all your different bonuses, both as a DM and as a player.
DM’s CommentaryNew and Exciting #10
D20 Source 400th Post!
D20 Source this week makes its 400th post! Thanks to all the readers, contributors and other bloggers who have made this one of the most popular Dungeons & Dragons blogs. Over 11,000 people read D20 Source each month and around 1,100 people subscribe via RSS.
I’d like to take the opportunity to ask for your feedback. What are your favourite articles? What are you interested in reading that D20 Source doesn’t already cover? What D&D problems need solving and what is the game missing?
Hit the commment link below and give your opinion!
Announcing a little RPG Design Challenge
Robot Chicken DD: Jaundice and the Ballista
D&D writer Chris Perkins continues his D&D game for the writers of Robot Chicken. I posted parts one to three and parts four to six. Here’s parts seven through nine, plus DM’s commentary editions of the first four parts.
Click onward for parts eight and nine, the DM’s commentary edition parts one to four, and an important note on the slip-up Chris Perkins makes in an earlier segment.
DM’s commentary Can I use Darkfire on the door?In part 5, the DM Chris Perkins rules that a player can’t use the drow Darkfire ability to melt the door, giving the reason that the power specifies “one creature” as its target, and the door isn’t a creature. Attentive viewers noted that the DM did allow players to make a basic attack on the door, which also specifies “one creature” as its target.
The Internet immediately leapt to complain. 4E is too inflexible! 4E’s writers are idiots!
However, Darkfire does not deal fire damage, or any damage – it only illuminates a target. Chris Perkins made the correct ruling, although he gave the wrong reason. Importantly, his quick decision kept the game going, which is the goal of a good DM.
Robot Chicken D&D: Jaundice and the Ballista
New and Exciting #9: Lou gets Sinister
World Building 101: Organizing your Organizations
D&D Gaming on Microsoft’s Surface
DD Gaming on Microsoft’s Surface
CNET reported on Wednesday about the D&D application for the Microsoft Surface from Carnegie-Mellon’s SurfaceScapes team. According to CNET, the team is working with Wizards of the Coast to potentially roll this out commercially, perhaps to gaming stores. Here’s a video of the table in action:
It’s a cool concept, but having run D&D games online for more than two years now I’m seeing a few flaws in this preview release.
First, despite the CNET writer’s opinion that this will speed up the game, this app is actually quite slow. Players appear to wait in turn to roll initiative using a shared d20, something no traditional D&D group settles for. The table simulates real dice like the iPhone app Mach Dice, when there’s no real need to. Anyone who’s run a tabletop game online in real-time will tell you a computer can calculate rolls much more efficiently than a human rolling a lot of real dice. Once you’ve lost the tactile sense of real dice, there’s no benefit to simulating rolls except to look good in a preview.
The virtual table dice also roll slowly for graphical effect, like an oversized d20. You can also see the dire wolf in the video move quite slowly, much more slowly than a real Dungeons & Dragons player would move his miniatures. Units in Rome: Total War move slowly across the world map like this, and the first thing I do is hit the key to speed them up. One would hope the DM’s interface is good.
Another difficulty in producing this product commercially is creating 3D models for the miniatures of the game’s massive number of monsters. When I counted the D&D Insider Compendium in January, there were 3,143 monsters not including templates. Each monster in this demo has animations for moving, attacking and standing idle, and we should also consider powers, terrain, and alternately coloured versions of the same monster to differentiate special units (orc captains, for example).
Even very high-profile videogames have a hard time including a tenth as many 3D assets as this: for example, Pokémon Battle Revolution, a game which features 3D graphics for all 493 Pokémon and 499 different attacks, pales in comparison to D&D 4E’s 3,143 monsters, 4,813 powers, 7,203 items and 342 traps.
I shouldn’t sound too negative, though, as I really like this concept. A D&D-specific gametable could handle lighting and line of sight much more accurately than most normal DMs care to. It can track powers and status effects more quickly and reliably than a human Dungeon Master. The Character Builder software could include QR code blocks that let the table read your character. And, as I said in December, you don’t need exact models for every miniature: a few hundred is plenty to adequately represent most of the creatures you’ll come across.
What would be especially cool is if you could roll real dice and have the table read the dice by OCR. It might announce results by voice – “Twenty-five. Critical hit, max damage.” The table could even be used to check dice for bias by rolling repeatedly. You would of course need a wider table area for people to keep their character sheets and dice, with a raised edge around the screen so nobody’s dice nudges onto the screen accidentally. Certainly a snazzy way to get new players into the game, and as a Dungeons & Dragons blogger who’s always interested in new readers, I naturally approve.
World Building 101: Incorporating New Content
Roleplaying games evolve continually. Even “dead” editions, that have been retired by their publishers, can still see unofficial support from fan communities. For systems still in print, new content tends to emerge on a regular basis, and it’s inevitable that at some point, player and DM alike will see something new that stirs them sufficiently to warrant inclusion into the existing campaign. For magic items or powers, this is pretty straightforward, but for new classes or character races, it can lead to complications.
Sometimes this is not a problem. If your campaign world is sufficiently large or open, introducing new elements may be as straightforward as simply saying that the new element has always been present but has not been important until just now. With more deeply established settings, with detailed histories and background, it may not be so simple—you may have to explain exactly why nobody has ever encountered the new race or class before now. There are really two steps involved in integrating new material into your campaign. Both are vital, but they occur at separate points in the creation and detailing of your world.
Prepare in Advance: Since it’s almost a given that new content will emerge during the course of your campaign, it makes sense to design from the ground up with this fact in mind. In fact this should almost always be a consideration anyway, especially if you want to allow your players to provide input into the setting. By leaving room for new ideas, you make it that much easier to incorporate them later on.
Make it Fit: Some campaigns are loose enough that introducing a new element requires only the act of including it in a game for the first time. “Oh sure, you’ve seen plenty of bug-men around, I just haven’t been pointing them out” can be sufficient explanation and justification for the introduction of a new player race, for example. However, especially if the new element is being used by a player character, it’s probably worth going the extra mile to properly work it into the setting, by giving the new element its own defined place in the world wherever possible. Create a history and story explaining the new race, or describe the way the new class fits into society—make them as much a part of your campaign as those elements that have been there from the beginning.
This can still present problems, though. If you’re running a published campaign world, for example, or if a new bit of content would invalidate established details of your world for whatever reason, then the integration process becomes more difficult. It may be tempting to simply tell a player that you can’t include the new content, but this is not an ideal solution, as it shuts down ideas from your players. Fortunately, there are ways that this can be circumvented, many of which provide potential plot hooks as a side effect. Some of these ideas have a large impact on your campaign setting, others are fairly minor, but most of them should be able to fit into any campaign world with a bit of effort.
- Stranger in a Strange Land – Perhaps the new player is not native to your campaign world. Planar travel is a fairly common concept for D&D, and the idea of a new character who has been transported out of his or her home and into a strange environment can be excellent for creating story hooks and explaining their presence. Maybe the PC playing the new character is a lone refugee, trying to find a way back home—what happens if, at a climactic moment, they are forced to choose between that and helping their new friends? Perhaps a large group of the new race were dropped wholesale into the world, and now must forge a place for themselves and find a new homeland among the people already living there—many conflicts could arise from such a situation, that could draw in the player characters to help sort things out.
- The Last of Their Kind – Perhaps the PC using the new content is part of a dying race or tradition, or the last survivor of a massacre seeking others of their own kind to rebuild. Alternately, perhaps they were believed to be extinct for centuries, and have just now begun to return to the world. The PC may not even know what has become of their people—maybe they were found in some sort of magical stasis by the other PCs, unaware of the passage of ages and uncertain of the fate of everyone they knew.
- The First of Their Kind – Conversely, the PC could be the first of a new race—whether created by magical experiments, divine intervention, or simply coming into being with no knowledge or recollection of the cause. Who created them, and why? What is their place in the world? The mystery of their creation, the fight for freedom from their sinister creators, or forging a place for their kind, could all serve as a backdrop for adventures.
- Homecoming – Perhaps the “new” race or class is actually an ancient one, that departed from the world millennia ago to explore the planes or contemplate the nature of magic, or for other inscrutable reasons. Perhaps they separated themselves from time in order to avoid a disaster, or perhaps they were forcibly separated by some external force. Why have they come back now, and what are the consequences of their return?
- Magical Disaster – A magical experiment or ritual gone wrong creates a rift to another world, or mutates existing life—or even creates it where there was none. Perhaps the disaster’s cause is not by any mortal agency—the death of a god may bring about chaos, or it may be some prophesied doom that befalls the world. What are the other consequences of the disaster? Will the world be forever changed by the chaos ripping through it, or is it a localized event that wipes out a single kingdom but leaves the rest intact? Even searching for the cause of the disaster, or a way to contain the effects, could be interesting stories.
- Hidden Temples or Lost Empires – Perhaps the new race or class simply exist, but hidden away from the world. Perhaps they prefer secluded monasteries that most people do not even realize exist, or perhaps they have some reason for their isolationism. What drives a PC from one of these groups out into the world at large? Is there some disease that must be cured, or a prophecy that must be fulfilled? Is it some sort of vision quest, or an exile for some transgression against a taboo?
These ideas are by no means exhaustive, but they make an excellent starting point for including new content into existing settings. Be careful not to let a single PC’s storyline dictate your entire campaign’s direction, though—remember that each player deserves a chance to shine. Integrating a new race or class into your campaign may provide a great story hook, but the focus should remain on the group as a whole, not any single player.
World-Building 101: Watch your Language!
Anyone who has read Lord of the Rings has encountered the fictional elven tongues Tolkien created for Middle Earth. Anyone familiar with Star Trek has heard snippets of Klingon. Fans of Star Wars can more than likely recognize Huttese, and for serious fans it’s not unheard of to be able to read, write, and speak any of these imaginary languages. Fictional languages lend depth and life to a setting, and can be used to great effect in a roleplaying campaign.
Of course, unless you and your players have a lot of time and are willing to devote both time and effort into creating and mastering a constructed language, chances are you will neither want nor need to do so to. If you and your players ARE all interested in constructing and learning a language for your game, then by all means go ahead. For the most part, however, that is an unnecessary level of detail and effort that can be avoided.
Constructing parts of a language, however, can still be worth the effort. A few phrases, a writing system, and perhaps even a rudimentary grammar can all be invaluable in creating the sense that a full language exists. Throwing together a simple “phrasebook” for some of your constructed languages may be useful to help your players pepper their speech with exclamations or sayings in-character using their linguistic knowledge, or provide a choice epithet or two. Even a bit of detail provided about the language without any vocabulary attached to it can be sufficient to spark the imagination. A few points you might consider:
Who speaks the language? When creating vocabulary or even just how you want the language to sound, consider the primary speakers. Savage monster races can have more sharp, guttural, crude languages, where races like elves and eladrin might have more fluid and beautiful languages. Some creatures may find it difficult to produce all the sounds in human or demihuman languages—try to consider the speech apparatus involved.
What is the language commonly used to discuss? The old saying goes that an Eskimo has fifty words for snow. Concepts that are important to a culture are frequently given more robust vocabulary than other less-frequently used parts. Dwarven languages may contain a large vocabulary relating to concepts found in mining, forging, or metallurgy, but have only one word for tree.
What other languages or dialects are related? Languages don’t exist in a void. German and English, for example, share a common ancestry, as do Romance languages. Language “families” might allow partial understanding of one language by creatures fluent in a related language—though this may be wildly inaccurate thanks to “false friends”, or words that sound the same but have dramatically different meanings. For example, Gift in German means poison, and not something that is given in friendship. Dialects are regional or social variants of a parent language—different pronunciations or colloquial vocabulary might be in use.
How is the language written? This can be quite complex to answer. First, consider whether the writing system is an alphabet (with one character representing one sound), a syllabary (one character represents a full syllable), an abjad (as an alphabet, but with vowels omitted and interpreted from context), or are glyphs or pictographs used to communicate entire words or concepts? What sounds exist in the language—without getting too technical, consider that some sounds in English are represented by multiple characters (ch, sh, th) and other characters can represent multiple sounds (c, g, x). Consider how the writing is oriented—is the language read from left to right, right to left, top to bottom, spiraling outwards, or alternating between two or more of these options? Constructing a writing system that feels real can be extremely rewarding and interesting, but it can also be the most time consuming and complicated step—unless you are creating grammar and vocabulary as well.
Are there idioms or concepts that are difficult to translate? Many languages have concepts or idioms that are difficult or impossible to directly translate. These are often sayings or phrases that communicate a figurative rather than literal meaning. “Kick the bucket” is an example of one such phrase in English—it becomes meaningless if translated literally. Other concepts might include specific honorifics for which there is no direct equivalent or words describing things or concepts not found in other languages.
There are many other ideas you may wish to explore when developing a language, but the above should be enough to get you started. Plenty of resources are available online for the dedicated DM who wishes to create a full blown constructed language for his campaign.
Three more points to consider—first, for simplicity’s sake, it’s generally easier to avoid trying to codify and detail each and every language, dialect, and language family found in your campaign world. In the real world there are over two hundred and fifty languages with 1 million or more native speakers, and easily double that number in languages spoken by smaller populations—and that is counting only living languages. Trying to represent even a fraction of that number of languages in your game world is probably well beyond the scope required—especially since with that many choices, if no direction is provided, your players may have no way to communicate with each other!
Second, you’ll probably want to give your campaign’s languages better names than “Dwarven”, “Elven”, “Common”, and the like. By giving the languages proper names, you lend verisimilitude and let your players know that they should put thought into language selection, rather than simply choosing languages as an afterthought.
Finally, languages as a campaign element are useful only as long as your players can understand them. Keep track of the languages your players have taken for their characters, and avoid creating situations where vital information or rewards are available only to speakers of a language your characters don’t speak. Use languages to enhance your game experience, not to limit it.
Youtube Sunday: Robot Chicken Play DD
Wizards of the Coast’s Chris Perkins runs a D&D session for five writers of Robot Chicken. Last week I posted parts one through three. Today I’m posting parts four through six.
Click onward for the next two parts.
Youtube Sunday: Robot Chicken Play D&D
Youtube Sunday: Robot Chicken Play D&D
